Author: Paul StJohn Mackintosh

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Library at Hellebore by Cassandra Khaw

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: The Library at Hellebore
Author: Cassandra Khaw
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Publication date: 22nd July, 2025

Synopsis: The Hellebore Technical Institute for the Gifted is the premier academy for the dangerously powerful: the Anti-Christs and Ragnaroks, the world-eaters and apocalypse-makers. Hellebore promises redemption, acceptance, and a normal life after graduation. At least, that’s what Alessa Li is told after she’s kidnapped and forcibly enrolled. But the Institute is more than just a haven for monsters. On graduation day, the faculty embark on a ravenous rampage, feasting on their students. Trapped in the school’s cavernous library, Alessa and her surviving classmates must do something they were never taught: work together. If not, this school will eat them alive.

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Articles / Interviews

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Ellen Datlow Shares What Giving Us 16 Years Of The Best Horror Is Like!

Ellen Datlow Shares What Giving Us 16 Years Of The Best Horror Is Like!

Ellen Datlow is the World Fantasy Award, Hugo Award and Bram Stoker Award-winning editor and anthologist for the Best Horror of the Year series, and for numerous other horror, fantasy and science fiction collections and series. She is hailed as one of the most influential voices in these genres.  

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Crimson Road by A.G. Slatter

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: The Crimson Road
Author: A.G. Slatter
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Publisher: Titan Books
Publication date: 11th February, 2025

Synopsis:  A captivating dark gothic fantasy set in the same universe as the award-winning author’s All The Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns and The Briar Book of the Dead. A tale of vampires, assassins, ancient witches and broken promises. By turns gripping and bewitching, sharp and audacious, this mesmerising story takes you on a journey into the dark heart of Slatter’s sinister and compelling fantasy world.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Sixteen, ed. Ellen Datlow

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

Title: The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Sixteen (Best Horror of the Year, 16)
Author: Various, Ellen Datlow (Editor)
Publisher: Night Shade
Genre: Horror
Release Date: November 26, 2024

Synopsis:  From Ellen Datlow—“the venerable queen of horror anthologies” per the New York Times—comes a new entry in the series that has brought you thrilling stories from Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, the best horror stories available.

For more than four decades, Ellen Datlow has been at the center of horror. Bringing you the most frightening and terrifying stories, Datlow always has her finger on the pulse of what horror readers crave. Now, with the sixteenth volume of the series, Datlow is back again to bring you the stories that will keep you up at night. Encompassed in the pages of The Best Horror of the Year have been such illustrious writers as: Neil Gaiman, Stephen King, Stephen Graham Jones, Joyce Carol Oates, Laird Barron, Mira Grant, and many others.

With each passing year, science, technology, and the march of time shine light into the craggy corners of the universe, making the fears of an earlier generation seem quaint. But this light creates its own shadows. The Best Horror of the Year chronicles these shifting shadows. It is a catalog of terror, fear, and unpleasantness as articulated by today’s most challenging and exciting writers.

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Epeolatry Book Review: The Incubations by Ramsey Campbell

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

​Title: The Incubations
Author: Ramsey Campbell
Genre: Horror, Supernatural Thriller
Publisher: Flame Tree Press
Date: 26th November, 2024

Synopsis: A collectable hardcover edition for Ramsey Campbell’s 60 years in publication.

 Leo Parker’s stay in Alphafen seems idyllic, but after he leaves, the nightmares begin: an airport turns into a labyrinth, his own words become treacherous if not lethal, and what are those creatures in the photographs he took? Even the therapy Leo undertakes becomes a source of menace.

 Perhaps Leo has roused an ancient Alpine legend. Even once he understands what he brought back, his attempts to overcome its influence may lead into greater nightmares still…

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Horror Tree Q&A: Angela Slatter and Australian gothic

Horror Tree Q&A: Angela Slatter and Australian gothic 

 

Angela Slatter has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar, a Shirley Jackson Award, three Australian Shadows Awards and eight Aurealis Awards. She is the author of All The Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns,The Briar Book of the Dead and the forthcoming The Crimson Road – all of them gothic fantasies set in the world of the Sourdough, Bitterwood and Tallow-Wife collections. The hardcover collected edition of her Hellboy Universe collaboration with Mike Mignola, Castle Full of Blackbirds, from Dark Horse Comics was published in July 2023.

Angela is also the author of the supernatural crime novels Vigil (2016), Corpselight (2017) and Restoration (2018), as well as ten other short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, A Feast of Sorrows: Stories, and The Heart is a Mirror for Sinners and Other Stories.

Angela has an MA and a PhD in Creative Writing, is a graduate of Clarion South 2009 and the Tin House Summer Writers Workshop 2006. In 2016 Angela was the Established Writer-in-Residence at the Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre in Perth. She has been awarded career development funding by Arts Queensland, the Copyright Agency and the Australia Council for the Arts.

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Epeolatry Book Review: Slow Burn by Mike Allen

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Our reviews may contain affiliate links. If you purchase something through the links in this article we may receive a small commission or referral fee. This happens without any additional cost to you.

​Title: Slow Burn
Author: Mike Allen
Genre: Horror Short Stories, Erotic Horror, Occult
Publisher: Mythic Delirium Books
Date: 16th July, 2024

Synopsis: The search for a missing grandson unearths a pit of unholy hunger. A war between flesh-stealing supernatural entities will subject an entire city to devastating mayhem. In a harrowing future world, a slave is charged by his terrifying master with building a creature in its likeness. The voyage of a plague ship won’t end at mere death. Parasites are partners and lovers, and the immortal soul is but a single stage in the complex life cycle of a symbiote.

Slow Burn gathers fourteen stories of horror and thirteen macabre poems by two-time World Fantasy Award finalist Mike Allen, author of the Shirley Jackson Award-nominated collections Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident. Allen’s works are “exquisite and vivid, his worlds rich with brilliant detail,” says three-time Bram Stoker Award® winner Christina Sng in her introduction. “The images he paints with words are terrifying and mesmerizing, keeping you enthralled and unable to look away.”

These tales and verses, set in worlds of fantasy and sorcery, in twisted, surreal futures, and in hard-boiled modern milieus . . . all find ways to explore the abyssal darkness of the human heart.

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Horror Tree Q&A: Gemma Files, Canadian horror icon

Horror Tree Q&A: Gemma Files, Canadian horror icon

Gemma Files is a Canadian horror writer, journalist, and film critic. Her short story, “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Short Story of 1999. Her novel Experimental Film (2015) won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the Sunburst Award for Best Canadian Speculative Fiction (Novel) in 2016. Her most recent publications include her Bram Stoker Award-winning collections In That Endlessness, Our End (2021) and Blood from the Air (2023).

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